


Limiter

by odoridango



Series: and i eat men like air [1]
Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-24
Updated: 2014-02-24
Packaged: 2018-01-13 16:38:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1233598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/odoridango/pseuds/odoridango
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eren is her mother’s daughter, and her mother is the strongest person she knows. Canon exploration with Eren as a female.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Limiter

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Polski available: [Limity](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3454937) by [Arqudis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arqudis/pseuds/Arqudis)



“Come on, push! He’s almost out!”

Eren is quiet, ready and waiting with a pile of clean cloths and a basin of warm water. The room around her is cacophonous, the girl on the bed panting and screaming hoarsely as she pushes the baby out, her mother and sister mumbling in worry. Strange, she thinks, furrowing her brow and frowning, they should be supporting her instead of letting her go it on her own. Decision made, Eren grabs a sweaty hand in her child’s palms.

“You can do it,” she says, squeezing the girl’s palm gently. “We got you. You can do it.” The girl stares at Eren’s face a little, squeezing back weakly, nodding, and then turning her face away on a choked sob as she pushes again, howl ripping from her as a strident cry rends the air, and Carla stands with a triumphant grin. Eren squeezes the girl’s hand one more time before she rushes the warm water and cloths over. Clean the baby, wrap the baby, and Eren makes ugly faces at the stupid sack of skin. It’s always surprising how such weird, wrinkly, squalling babies can be so full of life later, adventurous and inquisitive.

“It’s a boy—“ Carla starts, turning around with the babe in her arms.

“Don’t bring it over here!” the girl on the bed shrieks, legs still splattered with the fluid and blood of the afterbirth, cries and suffers, curling in on herself, heedless of the mess on the bedsheets. “I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to see it!”

Eren recognizes that look on her mother’s face, she gets it whenever the man at the fruit stand tries to get her to pay more than she should.

“He, not it,” she says firmly, “And it’s your chi—“

“ _I don’t want to see it!”_ the girl screams, sobbing, hands covering her face as she cries and hiccups like an animal, dirty, dirty, dirty, blood and who knows what else on her legs, and the mother and sister drag Eren’s mother into a corner, whisper and murmur again.

_by herself at night_

_got caught in an alley_

_what were we supposed to do_

_we’re giving it up for adoption_

“I’ll hate it,” the girl cries, and Eren takes her hand again, wipes at her wet cheek with a sleeve, and the girl turns to her, seeking warmth and heat the same way Eren does when she clambers into her parents’ bed during thunderstorms. “I’ll hate it. How can I raise it knowing I’ll hate it?”

This is how Eren first learns about rape.

Carla wears a knife in her sleeve when she goes out into the streets, warns off the men who leer and sneer from the sidestreets with a fierce hazel glare, mutters bad things under her breath when she sees some of the drunk Garrison soldiers wandering about, clutching Eren closer to her. Through fights, Eren learns that girls are an insult because the boys call Armin a girl like it’s a bad thing, and it makes her fight back even harder because that’s so stupid, do they talk to their mothers with those mouths, the mothers who make sure they’re fed and loved and safe, it’s so stupid to say that that’s something only weak people can do, because mothers are among the strongest people that Eren knows, and her mother is fierce and unyielding and a force of nature. Stupid boys.

And she listens and hears but she doesn’t really know until she finds the Ackerman couple dead on the floor of their home, until she hears two adult men talking about hurting a little girl the way the girl who gave her baby was hurt, remembers the shame and the grief and the anger and despair all rolled up in one, enough that a girl two times Eren’s age had to look to her for comfort because her mother and sister wouldn’t give it to her.

And Eren is scared, Eren is terrified and angry, because that girl could have been her, easily, the Ackerman girl too. She knocks, and they dismiss her because girls are an insult, dismissed, tossed aside, except that girls are strong and when she stabs into him with a howl, he screams the same way babies scream when they first come out of the womb, and Eren thinks that she wants to rip his throat and eyes out so he’ll never be able to see or say or do anything to anyone ever again.

But mother dies and the men who prowl the camps are lecherous. They are not safe. Girls are pretty, girls are soft to the touch and just as easy to tear apart and splatter because they tear at each other the same way others tear at them because that’s what they’ve learned. The adult world works on a transaction of sex and money, and Eren is scared, tired and young, and MIkasa is beautiful and new, and Armin is sweet and androgynous, and no one can protect them the way they used to be. Mothers are so strong, Eren thinks again distantly, huddling into a blanket with her friends on a snowy night.

The apprehension doesn’t go away when she joins the military, but she feels a little safer knowing that the girls’ shower is far away from the boys’ facilities, and they cover for each other. Mikasa is still here and they still like to brush each other’s hair when they can, and Ymir watches over them quietly, loud and unafraid, warding the boys away with insults and sarcasm, bumping shoulders with them as they troop through doors together, ruffling hair. Annie is strong and smart and something like mentor or maybe even a friend, and sometimes when Eren sits with her and Mina Carolina at the mess, they’re able to have easy conversation for ten minutes at least, not to mention that it’s nice to talk someone who won’t mind discussing how to build up muscle or put the right kind of rotation into a punch or a fist. Sasha’s meals are always good, and it’s when they get to talking about herb gardens that Mikasa joins in, and they talk until sunup, whispering under the covers.

And the boys are okay. Armin is great of course, because he’s Armin, and Franz is over all the time. He and Hannah are so in love it’s absolutely disgusting, and he treats her right, doesn’t put her down, encourages her when he can. Marco’s a right gentleman, and Connie says stupid things sometimes, but he doesn’t know any better, so when they correct him he backs down with a sheepish grin and doesn’t do it again. Eren suspects that Sasha’s been having talks with him, and he’s a great guy, fun to hang around and lively in conversation.

What Eren doesn’t like is Jean, staring after Mikasa all the time, calling Eren weak, and sometimes it feels like he’s looking down on her just because she’s a girl and can put his face in the mud easy as anything. Some of the boys are like that, bully the girls because they’re spoiled and think they’re stronger, resent her and Annie because of some sense of injured pride, measure girls by the disparity between their breasts and waists, snigger about PMS and periods when they’ve never seen Ymir collapse in pain after a hard day’s training, bundled in a blanket near Christa and a hot water bottle for the rest of the evening. And the uniform pants are white.

“That’s not it!” Jean protests when she confronts him about it.

“Explain it to me then,” she snaps.

It’s weird to remember that not everyone thinks the same way she does, that not everyone feels threatened when Reiner stands behind them, tall and broad and imposing, that not everyone carries a knife in their sleeve the way she and Mikasa do.

“You’re so different,” Jean mumbles, scratching at his neck. “Not anything like the girls in Trost.” And she feels like she might have misjudged him a little because he likes Mikasa because she’s strong, and that’s why Eren likes her too, that strength and kindness at the core of her sister. She’s seen the girls in Trost, and it’s different from Shiganshina living—the streets are clean and everyone dresses neatly in layers, embroidery at the collars and cuffs, the fancier ladies determined to reject the city’s image as some backward military post by single handedly supporting the network of clothing stores that stay up to date with Inner Wall fashions. When the girls present her with a beautiful crimson dress and set of low heels on her fourteenth birthday, she’s speechless, can’t do anything but feel the smooth, soft-spun fabric between her fingers, marvel at the delicate patterns of lace and the sweet spill of the ruffled skirt, the softness of worked leather on her feet. She’s never had the time or money to think about owning anything so nice. Weird to think that even now, she’s learning more about her own femininity even in the military. Learning how to be strong, not just in body.

“Sometimes I’m a little jealous of you,” Christa tells her one early morning, just this side of bitter. “You’re so unrestrained. You feel free.”

“No one’s going to fight for me,” Eren says as a reply, fingering the curling, still-wet ends of her hair. Sometimes she can’t believe she made Mikasa cut hers. “So I’m going to fight for myself.” She is her mother’s daughter, and her mother is the strongest woman she knows.

“What if they beat you?” Christa asks, and she’s cold and brittle with the early morning sun on her face, and Eren’s always found her a little too much, too nice, too willing to help. She likes this Christa better.

“If they beat me I’ll die,” Eren says.

“It’s that easy.”

“Yup. So you fight. If you don’t fight, you don’t live.”

So mote it be: Eren fights and Eren dies, she gets verbally harassed and threatened by the guards of her dingy cell, is beaten brutally in a courtroom full of people, has her squad point their weapons at her with the intent to kill.

All the same, Auruo badgers her and swats at the bun tied at the back of her head, and Gunter offers a fist-bump after she flips Erd over her hip during sparring practice. Petra is delighted to have another girl on the squad, and they make faces at each other in the shower when they find out that their cycles are beginning to sync. The Captain walks in on them when they start complaining about the inconveniences of the female reproductive system, and they’ve never seen him scuttle back out of a room so quickly before, shriek with laughter as they cradle cups of ginger tea.

“Do you have a crush on anyone?” Petra asks.

Eren shakes her head. “I don’t have time for that.”

Eren will never marry. Eren will never have children. She’ll never put on a wedding dress, just like she’ll never put on the red dress her friends got her, still folded carefully and delicately next to her civvies in the bottommost drawer of her basement cell.

No, Eren thinks she’ll never live long enough for any of that to happen at all.

“What does my titan form look like?” she asks at breakfast, because no matter how hard she tries, she can’t imagine it, even though she’ll probably die wearing her titan form.

“You’re pretty human looking,” Eld says thoughtfully. “Your hair’s about the same length.”

“You don’t have lips, so all your teeth are exposed. And your jaw unhinges when you roar sometimes,” Gunter jumps in after finishing a bite of egg.

“You’re muscular and you have no boobs,” Auruo complains, and Petra elbows him hard enough that he chokes on his last sip of herbal tea.

“You’re strong,” Petra says firmly.

Eren smiles.


End file.
